The Yellow Boat, 1891

Gustave Caillebotte

The wealthiest member of the Impressionist circle, Caillebotte helped finance the groupâ€™s exhibitions and actively collected the work of his friends in the 1870s and early 1880s. By the late 1880s, however, his attention had shifted to designs for the gardens and boats he kept at a country house in Gennevilliers, twenty miles down the Seine from central Paris. The yellow boat depicted here was likely one of the artistâ€™s own design. The composition, abandoned unfinished in 1891, depicts a stretch of the river not far from his house.